Imagine Step Brothers meets Mouse Hunt; that's Awful Nice.
Sibling rivalries are ripe territory for comedies. It's the sort of situation where years-long resentments boil over and make a general mess of things. It's funny because it's family, and it's more spiteful because it's family, and there's just a bit of sadness in there too (since it's family).
There's an example of this early on in Awful Nice. Jim (James Pumphrey) and Dave (Alex Rennie) are the squabbling siblings in question. They're having dinner with family following their dad's funeral. After a toast, Jim and Dave sip their champagne. They they eye each other, they realize that they're inexplicably trying to gulp their champagne faster. The champagne done, they each pick up their glasses of beer. Then the water. The race continues with a gravy boat. And then they try to beat the s**t out of each other as their relatives look on shocked. (There's an Alonzo Mourning rookie card involved in this too, one that I may have in a box somewhere.)
These kinds of absurd escalations into slapstick (and cartoon violence) are what Awful Nice does Best. That isn't to say it's dialog driven humor isn't spot on as well. There's a certain quickness to the back and forths between the two brothers in this movie that reminds me of Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Swingers. The dialogue comes fast, the insults and jabs arrive quicker, and there's a sense of personality that arises from comic beat to comic beat.
Beyond the verbal and physical comedy in Awful Nice, there's a good knack for little details and sight gags. There's the pet tarantula in the opening scene which helps lend an extra layer of sordidness to what Dave's life in the tepee must have been like. A later throwaway moment involving Tabasco sauce also builds a sense of rough-and-tumble history. In the background in an office scene, there's a piece of art featuring a bear driving a speedboat.
Awful Nice shoots from gag to gag rapidly, which makes the movie breeze by, but the last third feels like it's maybe lacking something toward the end. It's not bad and it thankfully doesn't become sentimental in an unearned way. They could have easily gone there, but the movie is resistant to such easy, feel-good moments that would undermine the bitterness of it's main relationship. I think that's admirable, actually, since it'd be easy to go for some easy emotional beat and wrap up the film with a bow.
But the resolution does come a little too easy and it's not as satisfying as everything that leads up to it. In some ways what happens is telegraphed well in advance, and for a film where the jokes seem to come out of nowhere, something that I could see coming feels a bit disappointing. In that respect, I wish the plot was treated more like the jokes in the film, that there'd be a sense of surprise to both the set-up and the punchline.
And yet I can't completely hold this movie's faults against it, since it did it's job as a comedy and as a story. It made me laugh throughout, and it made me care about the characters, and ultimately, that's what matters. I highly recommend giving this movie a spin at your local Netflix.
